Killed Strangely : The Death of Rebecca Cornell

個数:

Killed Strangely : The Death of Rebecca Cornell

  • 提携先の海外書籍取次会社に在庫がございます。通常3週間で発送いたします。
    重要ご説明事項
    1. 納期遅延や、ご入手不能となる場合が若干ございます。
    2. 複数冊ご注文の場合、分割発送となる場合がございます。
    3. 美品のご指定は承りかねます。
  • 【入荷遅延について】
    世界情勢の影響により、海外からお取り寄せとなる洋書・洋古書の入荷が、表示している標準的な納期よりも遅延する場合がございます。
    おそれいりますが、あらかじめご了承くださいますようお願い申し上げます。
  • ◆画像の表紙や帯等は実物とは異なる場合があります。
  • ◆ウェブストアでの洋書販売価格は、弊社店舗等での販売価格とは異なります。
    また、洋書販売価格は、ご注文確定時点での日本円価格となります。
    ご注文確定後に、同じ洋書の販売価格が変動しても、それは反映されません。
  • 製本 Hardcover:ハードカバー版/ページ数 256 p.
  • 言語 ENG
  • 商品コード 9780801440021
  • DDC分類 364.1523097456

Full Description

Killed Strangely is an engaging read that will entrance and inform readers who are at once murder mystery and history buffs.— Cornelia Hughes Dayton -- Common-Place

"It was Rebecca's son, Thomas, who first realized the victim's identity. His eyes were drawn to the victim's head, and aided by the flickering light of a candle, he 'clapt his hands and cryed out, Oh Lord, it is my mother.' James Moills, a servant of Cornell... described Rebecca 'lying on the floore, with fire about Her, from her Lower parts neare to the Armepits.' He recognized her only 'by her shoes.'"—from Killed Strangely

On a winter's evening in 1673, tragedy descended on the respectable Rhode Island household of Thomas Cornell. His 73-year-old mother, Rebecca, was found close to her bedroom's large fireplace, dead and badly burned. The legal owner of the Cornells' hundred acres along Narragansett Bay, Rebecca shared her home with Thomas and his family, a servant, and a lodger. A coroner's panel initially declared her death "an Unhappie Accident," but before summer arrived, a dark web of events—rumors of domestic abuse, allusions to witchcraft, even the testimony of Rebecca's ghost through her brother—resulted in Thomas's trial for matricide.

Such were the ambiguities of the case that others would be tried for the murder as well. Rebecca is a direct ancestor of Cornell University's founder, Ezra Cornell. Elaine Forman Crane tells the compelling story of Rebecca's death and its aftermath, vividly depicting the world in which she lived. That world included a legal system where jurors were expected to be familiar with the defendant and case before the trial even began. Rebecca's strange death was an event of cataclysmic proportions, affecting not only her own community, but neighboring towns as well.

The documents from Thomas's trial provide a rare glimpse into seventeenth-century life. Crane writes, "Instead of the harmony and respect that sermon literature, laws, and a hierarchical/patriarchal society attempted to impose, evidence illustrates filial insolence, generational conflict, disrespect toward the elderly, power plays between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, [and] adult dependence on (and resentment of) aging parents who clung to purse strings." Yet even at a distance of more than three hundred years, Rebecca Cornell's story is poignantly familiar. Her complaints of domestic abuse, Crane says, went largely unheeded by friends and neighbors until, at last, their complacency was shattered by her terrible death.